Have you ever felt more comfortable watching a TV show or movie about a historical event than reading about it from a history book? Oftentimes, it’s easier to connect with retellings or representations of peace and conflict through art than to read historical facts and figures.
Fiction and art are safe spaces to engage with new ideas. By seeing peace and conflict expressed through films, visual art, and music, individuals can wrestle with the feelings these portrayals evoke and discern how they would respond when faced with a similar situation.
Storytelling is a powerful medium for understanding complex social issues like peace and conflict, as stories are easy to relate to and simpler to digest. Popular media like franchises, television series, protest music, and visual art often mirror real-world struggles over power, injustice, moral ambiguity, and resistance. Through these portrayals, audiences are exposed to the ethical dilemmas and complex politics at play in real-world conflict contexts, ideally increasing their empathy and understanding of how these conflicts unfold and how to help solve them.
Conflict and Peace Are Rarely About Evil vs. Good
While film and television are powerful media to portray stories of peace and justice, they can’t always tell the whole story. In some cases, these stories complicate the idea of clear heroes and villains, leading to misinterpretation and debates among viewers that undermine the media's message. On the other extreme, oversimplified narratives in film and television can distort viewers’ understanding of peace and conflict in the real world. Both of these representations desensitize individuals to what peace and conflict look like, but in reality, it’s complex and informed by history, identity, trauma, and systems of power.
Just as you wouldn’t want to be defined by your best or worst moment or reaction to a situation, reducing peace and conflict to one-sided or strawman examples can do more harm than good. Conflict management and resolution work require nuanced analysis that takes a community’s whole context into account. Effective stories can balance these interests and help viewers understand the complexity of peacework worldwide.
Power, Empire, and Structural Violence
Systems of power often have a great ability to impact societies through their historical rule and wide circle of influence. Because of this, film, television, and visual arts often depict systems of power at work, and over a longer period of time, rather than isolated acts of random violence. This situates the viewer within an organization’s habitual abuse of power, rather than suggesting a violent act is a one-off. Institutions and systems can perpetuate conflict beyond individual actions, as their presence and influence in societies are often deeply rooted, and the laws and resources surrounding them can shield them from uprisings.
The portrayal of systemic abuse in media is an accurate reflection of real-world realities like authoritarian governance, colonial legacies, and entrenched inequality. Peace and conflict professionals must be well-versed in the historical and current abuses of power in an area. They must be willing and trained to examine systems that need reform, rather than focusing too closely on surface-level events. This holistic approach to peacebuilding allows for the roots of justice issues to be addressed, rather than just the symptoms of a larger problem receiving attention.
Resistance, Justice, and Peacebuilding
As vehicles of storytelling that can span generations, music, film, and television have the space to portray the moral complexity of resistance movements. They can explore the viewpoints of multiple parties involved in peace work, from the more conservative and cautious to the bold and brazen. Media is also a safe space to explore the ethical questions involved in conflict situations. Pieces can discuss when resistance is justified, how resistance is most productively expressed in individual situations, and how justice is defined for different groups of people with unique cultural and traumatic histories.
Media can portray real-world social movements and nonviolent resistance, giving viewers a look into historic peaceful protests and inspiring them to enact change in the present. Art and storytelling can also portray post-conflict justice, offering peacemakers a goal to aim for. By engaging with justice-related concepts through the media, individuals can absorb and enact concepts such as restorative justice, reconciliation, and ethical leadership.
Star Wars as One Lens for Understanding Peace and Conflict
Star Wars has gone from niche science fiction to a cultural touchstone, carrying its themes of peace and conflict into the broader societal awareness. It joined other timeless stories about power, resistance, and moral choice and cemented itself as an accessible picture of family dynamics, authoritarian power, and the cost of rebellion.
The overarching narratives of Star Wars stem from the consequences of imbalance and domination. The evil Empire gains power through fear tactics, manipulation, and a misuse of the Force. As a result, vulnerable planets and people groups are held captive by a domineering regime, and those who seek balance through peaceful conflict resolution are slaughtered. The solution to a more equitable future for all in the Star Wars movies is to find a balance in the Force, the energy that runs through all living things. The Jedi, at their best, show how to wield their power with wisdom and grace, while the Sith mar the Force's intention and use their abilities to oppress others.
Star Wars provides a helpful fictional landscape to explore topics of peace, with real-world connections such as the Emperor’s total control mirroring that of dictators throughout history, and the elimination of the Jedi at the end of Episode III reflecting genocides. However, this story is a limited case study of peace and conflict, as the Emperor is a one-dimensional representation of evil and abused power and lacks nuance in his motives.
The Star Wars franchise continues to effectively demonstrate real-world peacebuilding skills such as ethical decision-making, restraint, and accountability. The Jedi often choose justice and peace over personal retribution, giving criminals fair trials and refusing to serve as judge, jury, and executioner. In this way, the franchise serves as a helpful introduction to peacebuilding for children and adults alike.
Conflict Management and Transformation, Not Conflict Elimination
As societies develop, the definition of peace and justice can change. New people groups need representation, and the old way of doing things is often not the most equitable and sustainable approach to a healthy future. Conflict, therefore, needs to evolve rather than disappear. While conflict is inevitable, it can be transformed constructively to create a peaceful society.
Conflict management and resolution focus on the long-term transformations needed for a society rather than short-term fixes. This approach is central to professional peacebuilding and meditation work, as it establishes a framework for peacebuilders to evaluate the long-term success of their efforts and provides societies with a baseline to return to when conflict arises again.
From Fiction to the Field: Peace and Conflict Studies in the Real World
Stories provide accessible landscapes for societies to imagine justice, conflict, and reconciliation. Through characters they can relate to and events that mirror historical peacebuilding efforts, individuals can look to stories for help in their own efforts for peace and justice. These depictions can inspire students to seek ways to work toward peace in their careers.
Students who choose degrees centered around peace and conflict studies prepare themselves to work across cultures, sectors, and systems. The practical skills learned in degree programs allow students to put their beliefs about the importance of peace into practice, while exploring best practices and likely outcomes in a safe space. One of the core principles in peace studies is conflict management and resolution. This prepares students to consider cultural contexts and systemic realities as they work to construct unique peace plans for every society.
At the University of San Diego Kroc School of Peace Studies, we teach passionate students to be effective peacemakers. Where most view conflict as a problem to be avoided, we consider it a normal part of the human experience and an exciting opportunity to cultivate long-lasting positive change.
Our Flex Master of Science in Conflict Management and Resolution is an interdisciplinary, values-driven program grounded in real-world practice. Students don’t just learn about the principles of effective peacebuilding in a classroom; they put their courses to the test in hands-on application across the world. Through an explicit focus on identity-based conflict and an emphasis on human skills, students in our MS in Conflict Management and Resolution program learn to incorporate a community’s varied needs and cultural wounds into an effective plan, tailoring their peacebuilding efforts to what each group needs most.
Peace is possible, but it isn’t one-size-fits-all. Learn to tailor peacebuilding to the communities you’re passionate about at the Kroc School of Peace Studies.
